There's been a fair amount of achieving going on in the past 10 days :)
Of our 256 achievements, so far all but 31 have been earned by at least one player. That's 87.9% of the total. At this point the highest achievement rate by individual players is around 66%.
Looking at the top of the global achievements list...
It's mostly what we'd expect, although worth pointing out it's kinda funny that The Most Popular Achievement will unlikely ever actually reach #1. Uninvited Guest in particular is an achievement that everyone will get on their first run, and technically speaking we'll always have new players joining who haven't yet finished a run to get the, um, "most popular" :P
Crack Shot and Storm Trooper are also both very common scenarios when just starting out (especially Storm Trooper among beginners who haven't yet learned how to maximize accuracy).
All these are pretty basic achievements though--all the really fun stuff is still a lot lower on the list as different players aim for different goals. We'll look at some of those another time.
I may also later add the global percentages to the in-game UI for players connected to Steam.
Speaking of achievements, remember that collage I made for the
Beta 6 release? Just a fun gif related to that: To create the background I added a debug command in the game's console which creates a new window over everything and randomly fills it with achievement icons, automatically saving a whole bunch of screenshots that I could then pick from.
Trippy, eh? :D
Data MinerAs usual following a major release, I've collected a bunch of stats to share.
You can read all the details
on the forums.
It'll be fun to look at achievement progress across the entirety of Beta 6 once the next release is out, but let's not get ahead of ourselves xD
Community <3Our community has been quite active lately! (And not necessarily tied to this particular release :P)
A group of expert players have begun collaborating on a sort of detailed "complete guide" to Cogmind. There's nothing to show yet, but it's taking shape. It's also going to be chock full of spoilers.
The spoiler-free "guide" I wrote, a.k.a. the 60-page manual, has also been reformatted to a very nice PDF version for Beta 6 by Phragmented.
It's available as both a standard PDF document with chapters, and a printable booklet. You can download both
here.
For the community of Japanese players, PlasticHeart has shared with us his
guide for preparing for a flight/hover run. He then even
translated Valguris' quick guide to the early game (
the original is a useful read if you are relatively new to the game). Cogmind itself doesn't support translations, but from what I've seen even having the manual translated has brought in new players from Japan.
There's been a fair number of players streaming this week, including... me :). I was going to stream last week but a household emergency put a stop to that, so this week it was finally time for some Beta 6. I streamed twice, a single run spread across two days, and won it. Just barely. In epic fashion. So it was definitely worth it :D. It got pretty slow at certain points with all the talking and strategizing, but we came out on top in the end. There's a
full summary of part 1 and 2 on the forums, including links to YouTube.
zxc also spent a while streaming and uploaded his
to YouTube. Speedrunning is in vogue again now that there are a couple of achievements for it :P
Probably the community news with the biggest OMG factor is that Ape3000 has continued expanding and refining his wonderful player progression graphs yet further, and they now include everyone on the leaderboards! Some more samples:
There are over 20 graphs for each player.
Check your own progress on the website. (Don't bother looking at mine, because unlike most players I don't migrate my data between versions and have always started with a fresh build each release :P)
As a reminder: If you don't want to upload your score data you can still create the graphs yourself if you can run the scripts found
here.
After 6 Comes 7Fortunately there's a ton to play with in Beta 6, because Beta 7 will probably take a while.
Lots to do with the new robot hacking system (still in planning stages), but there are also some external factors at play...
Rather than working on Cogmind, I've already had to spend much of my dev time this week dealing with the new
GDPR thing coming out of the EU. This involved
lots of research and subsequent updating of my website, forums, blog, mailing lists, etc... At least it's a nice initiative and a worthy cause.
Anyway, yay that's mostly done at this point, but next week I'll be consumed by... taxes.
As you can see the upcoming week is going to be pretty boring :/
For this reason I'm going to skip next week's SITREP and focus on getting these and other annoying chores out of the way before really focusing on the next release. I'll still be around in chat, though, and will almost certainly stream again before the next SITREP, so maybe I'll see you there :)
Cogmind made a
Top 100 indie games list. There are so many good games out there now that these lists are pretty subjective, but hey I'm not gonna complain! (Sure has been a while since Cogmind had any coverage from any
major news outlet, though xD)
Today also marks the third anniversary of Cogmind's public Early Access program! With other games this might not be something worth celebrating, implying that it's taking forever to finish the game, but Ive put in over 6,000 hours of work in that time, and although it would've been appropriate to launch 1.0 last year I decided not to. For the time being I'd rather just keep making major additions to the game for free, which makes more sense to do under EA rather than "full release." After all, traditional roguelikes that keep getting updates for a long time are great, and it's hard to stop working on this when there are so many more ideas and it's "only" been five years so far :P
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on Steam, but feel free to post replies here, too :)
